by Kali Altsoba
Normal gas exchange in his blood reverses, dumping oxygen from his organs and brain. He’s still alive but unaware that his skin is turning a wan blue, in contrast to the pale wheat of his crisp new KRA uniform. In a minute his heart stops beating, blood stops circulating, and it and he start to cool. Half a minute more and sweet young Jarred dies of vacuum asphyxiation.
War in space is clean. The dead almost never bother to come back from there. They don’t impose goo and corrupted bones, or ask for cremation or symbolic scattering. Or demand public words and private tears. They just float in blue frozen permanence to some far distant country.
***
Madame Janine Whitmore is very much alive. She’s under preventive confinement in a RIK detention camp, a special one built for relatives of known hold-out fighters. She’s moved there after the Pilsudski Wood ambush of 10th Armored’s scouts. Grün occupation police tell her that her son’s in the forest, that he’s “a filthy bandit.” They order her to make a broadcast calling on him to surrender. She doesn’t believe it’s true about her Jarred. Neither does Jarred’s father, Monsieur Tadeusz Whitmore. He’s quite sickly but cares for Janine well. They don’t live in Portwen anymore. They live instead in Hut #3, Quad 7, Row 14. They think of Jarred daily.
A few days after they’re moved to the camp a widow joins them who always smells a bit like garlic soup. She swears to its medicinal properties, praising the Buddha for small pleasures like garlic in this world. She comes from a small farm where she was struggling to hang on by herself, trying to bring in the harvest without her dead husband or missing son. He’s away in the war somewhere, with Gold Division. Or maybe he’s dead. Anne-Marie Wysocki is grateful for the roof and room and company of the Whitmores. She and Janine grow quite close.
They’ll carry on living as best they can, never knowing what befell their sons. They’re not listed in long scrolls of dead or captured posted by the occupiers at every village hall and on the heavily-censored Genève memex. So many were incinerated by plasma or cremated after the ‘Sacrifice at the Berm,’ some days they’ll think their sons really are dead. And they’ll weep.
It’s hard to accept, with no bodies to keen over and grieve as motherhood and Nature require. Like Beowulf’s mother, these two prematurely-aging women wait daily on news of lost sons-at-war. Like her, they are ‘sore dreaded evil days will come, much carnage, war’s alarms, captivity, ignominy, and the heavens swallow up the smoke.’ Toruń is shrouded in smoke.
What they call ‘Sacrifice at the Berm’ the RIK and new GovNeb calls ‘Victory at the Toruń Perimeter.’ RSU men watch Janine closely. She has to report to them in Toruń every week, but they never tell her why. Never say that her wicked son is the ‘Ghost in the Wood.’ Refuse to say if he lives or not. Even if they knew, they wouldn’t tell her. They don’t even tell their superiors that he’s gone. Men are executed for a lot less that letting the Ghost escape.
Janine laments that she has no garden where she can grow fresh flowers to keep in a vase, reminding her of best times when gentle Jarred came home to her with scents of roses or lilies or a fistful of african moons he especially loved. She even misses tartly scented carnations.
She’ll grieve when her husband Tadeusz is summarily executed six months after Alpha leaves, for “attempting unlawful escape and violation of curfew.” He’ll step outside the thin, electronic boundary of the camp to buy a loaf of bread to bring home to a hungry wife and her best friend. And to seek out for the graying love-of-his-life news of her dear and missing son.
His friend, the Portwen baker, will be conscripted to bake for the detainees. So he’ll get to move about a bit, bringing in flour and salt and small supplies from town, get to meet people who come and go quietly after curfew. Tadeusz will go to see him to buy bread and ask his old friend the peripatetic baker “is there news about our son, Jarred? Or Anne-Marie’s boy, Jan?”
Janine’s appeal for mercy will be denied. Tadeusz will be shot by a camp execution party. Like his simple life, Tadeusz’s needless death will leave no mark on the history of the Thousand Worlds of Orion or even on quiet Genève. Janine will miss him sorely nonetheless.
Jump
Alpha is in the second half of the ‘S’ turn, cutting behind the Kölns, ready to burn white-hot in a final frantic burst as it emerges from the turn at all-out speed to dive for the bohr-zone. Captain Magda Aklyan barks orders as Alpha pulls past the short line of older Kaigun frigates.
“All warships. Aft missiles in short spread: shoot!”
“Missiles away, captain.”
Three stubby missiles hurtle from rear tubes on Resolve. Two more bolt from Tyco Brae. The aft tubes on Asimov remain still and silent. Asimov can’t shoot.
Its aft tubes are shattered and twisted and it’s venting a comet-tail of steam-snow from its broken catapults. Two inert missiles and large bits of broken firing tubes and bulkhead are already tumbling out-of-control, on a two-year journey to collide with cold blue Wasp.
Jarred Whitmore’s frozen corpse is headed there as well, inside a companion cloud of wooden bunk splinters, a hundred thousand shattered chips of white bulkhead paint, and millions of harmless canister pellets from Asimov’s smashed aft gravel bins.
“All ships. Disperse aft canister. Two second delay. Full cones, shoot!”
It’s Magda’s preemptive try to blunt expected return missiles from the Kaigun frigates, delayed so that the gravel won’t interrupt Alpha’s five flying the other way.
Two huge cones leave aft rail-guns on Resolve and Tyco Brae. Captain Tiva has serious damage back there and no aft tubes on Asimov, but he manages to spray a ragged spread of ceramic pellets from his partly blocked dispenser. It’s not a full cone, but it’s not nothing.
Braunschweig, Karlsruhe, and Raule shoot single aft missiles just after Alpha passes and jags back onto a straight course to the LP, completing the ‘S’ and arriving at last on the other side of the blockading frigate line. Wounded Lubeck is drifting off that line and slow-spinning without stabilizers, its hard-pressed crew fighting onboard fires. She can’t get off an aft shot.
Alpha will be out of range before the frigates reload their second volley, but it’s not out of danger. Plasma-cannon and lasers on all ships are still engaging. Magda and her little fleet need to inflict much more damage even as they run, to belay a hot pursuit into the bohr-jump.
Five torpedoes burning bright with fusion thrust are already closing distance to the line of frigates. They streak past the three incoming Grün missiles before the latter explode with brilliant multicolored splashes as they meet the dense canister cones. The instant evaporations are far enough away they do no damage to the fleeing Krevan ships. Not so the other way.
Braunschweig loses steering from a torp detonation 0.1 klics off her stern. But her maxim-guns, basically short-range canister-dispensers, take out another one of Resolve’s missiles as it flies ahead of the much bigger gravel cones. It’s a ‘stubby,’ looking rather like a too-fat duck but packing a massive destructive punch that threatens to annihilateBraunschweig if it hits.
Without moving parts, maxim frictionless compressed steam tubes spray hundreds of thousands of quarter-gram ice-pellets per second. They’re standard intimate-defense against AI-homing missiles. Ultra short-range. ‘Last stand’ sort of thing.
Karlsruhe takes heavy damage from Tiva’s scraggy cone, which overheats and erodes parts of the aft hull. Frigates don’t have strong dodgers directly aft as they do in front, to protect against forward micro-dust impact. Karlsruhe is holed badly, and starts venting gas and people.
Magda grips the arms of her chair. ‘Gods, we’re been far more lucky than good with our shooting, and theirs. OK, I’ll take it. Now, if our luck can only hold up one more minute...’
Karlsruhe evades Resolve’s missiles, but the contorted maneuvers required to do it overwhelm her main stabilizers, flipping her sideways into a hard spin, careering guns in crazy directions and confusing its AI-targeting computers even more
than its human gunners. The ‘S’ maneuver is working, confounding and capsizing an enemy commander, crew and flagship.
‘One spinning and two hurt and adrift! Émile is right. Köln frigates are walty ships! They flounder in too-tight turns. Score another one for the kid. If we’d swung wide as common sense and the KRN book said, instead of tight like this, we’d be taking full broadsides now.’
Only Raule is left in this fight. Its crew is skilled and no cowards. Although its inept top gunners only scored one hit on the initial pass, its old daisa is a shrewd captain. He evades the last two missiles from Tyco Brae, using the same evasive maneuver to also flip his ship 180˚ without succumbing to Braunschweig’s walty fate, even though Raule makes the same turn. Now he has a forward missile and a loaded, medium chase-gun hung below his prow.
Outnumbered three-to-one by more modern Krevan warships, a brave Kaigun crew and daisa boost at all-out speed, pushing their fusion reactor to near critical and engaging boosters. It works. Raule closes distance until it’s almost inside the open bottom of Alpha’s tetrahedron.
The daisa brings to bear his reloaded forward missile tube and low-mounted chase gun. He has a single, clear shot at the smaller of the troopships, Jutlandia. All three escorts are now ahead and to the flanks of the two transports. He’s caught out Magda and Alpha badly, with a clever and unexpected loop-the-loop followed by a sudden battle-speed boost to firing position.
“No working tubes aft and I’m all out of canister,” reports Tiva from Asimov. For once, there’s no hint of fun in his voice. He’s all business now, a professional navy man.
Other ships are frantically reloading aft but can’t get a shot in time. They, too, are out of gravel. Magda told them to use it all in the decisive ‘S’ turns, to hold nothing back fore or aft.
“He’s in the lane!”
Émile shouts the terrible news to Magda.
“Settle down, XO. Keep reporting, but do it calmly.”
She doesn’t feel calm, either. She searches desperately for a solution, but can’t find one in the time left. She grips the arms of her command chair, waiting for the inevitable death of the exposed troopship. Raging within at its killer and her order to use all canister on one gambit.
He holds fire to point-blank range, confident of his superior position and certain the two new-painted civilian ships ahead are still unarmed. Certainly not with anything to hurt his well-armored warship. He wants an absolute kill-shot with his one remaining missile, before Raule bails and flees from the angered escorts, throwing off flares, decoys and derision as it flies.
He probes the troopship with an acid blue laser, registering a burning hit on Jutlandia’s jury-rigged afterguard. The poorly-fitted plates fly apart, exposing the liner’s main nozzle and engine vitals and its soft, interior civilian hull. There’s no way for pregnant Jutlandia to defend herself. She only mounts a small forward-facing and thus useless cannon. Her escorts turn hard and fast, but they can’t shift relative position in time or take out the mortal threat behind.
Raule’s fierce daisa focuses on final approach and making his kill-shot. He’ll send a raging missile’s iron indignation tearing up Jutlandia’s naked vent to explode the ship from the inside-out, aborting the bloody contents of its womb into space. In a corner of his vision he sees the larger troopship adjust its nose. Abandoning its little sister, readying to run at flank speed.
‘A cowardly civilian crew, angling away from my perfect chase position. Oh, to have a second missile tube!’
But he doesn’t, so he lets the bigger troop carrier go in favor of the sure shot, the killing of an ungainly, pregnant Krevan bitch waddling right in front of him. It fills his tactical screen.
‘A fat ship locked in my sights is worth a...’
In fact, KRN Warsaw has a fine naval crew working under the aggressive Captain Tura Dan. It’s not running at all. It’s realigning its stern, not its prow. The quick angular turn-in-place imparts an illusion of readying to run that’s entirely immaterial to the real intent of its captain. In a moment’s calm courage, Warsaw’s stern points directly back at Raule.
The old daisa wants to see Jutlandia in real time as he kills her. When he looks out his Main Scuttle, just before giving the order to rip open her full belly, he’s startled to see what the other waddly liner is doing.
‘It isn’t accelerating away at all. Shit, it’s braking!’
As water is essential for life planetside, so it is also for war in space. All warships and navies are wrapped around ice, as well as carrying internal fire. Water is cheap, abundant, easily mined in space and stored anywhere and everywhere in a working warship. Water fills the space between a warship’s outer and inner hulls, shielding from cosmic radiation far better than any other insulation or medium. Water lubricates and powers everything from hydrogen boosters to steam catapults to life support. Even hydroponics, if your captain has a thing for fresh veggies.
And if needs be, a ship’s supercooled water and ice reserve can pack a real punch loaded in a basic kinetic cannon. One advantage of an ice-gun like the big one slung under Warsaw’s bloated belly is that ice-blocks convert to highly effective kinetic ammunition. Mass-squared-by-velocity at impact is the thing that matters, not the simple composition of the impacting mass.
An ice-gun, or Hyper Velocity Projectile rail cannon, shoots 100-kilo sabots of ice. Supercooled, superhard ice. It’s beautifully simple. Each block is wrapped in a protective sabot fitted with small steering lasers controlled by a basic, non-AI passive guidance system. Its tiny lasers heat a small second packet of ice, separately mounted, to produce high pressure vapor. The steam is then forced through petite nozzles to make minimal course corrections en route to target. The process is elementary but the final effect on impact can be quite dramatic.
Sabot ice-rounds have no tricky plasma to contain in an electromagnetic chamber that just might fail in storage. That makes ice weapons exceptionally safe even for a fat, converted troopship. The great defect is that it’s a line-of-sight weapon, powerful but not too smart. HVPs have to line up pretty much straight on target for a point-blank shot. That’s what Warsaw’s crew is doing with the reeve-mounted, aft kinetic rail-cannon, the ‘ice-gun’ slung under the old liner hull at Toruń shipyard. Tura Dan is aligning it to fire sabot right into Raule’s portentous Bridge.
Raule’s captain sees the danger all at once, looming in his Main Scuttle and his personal future. He screams the order: “Engine Room, halt! Full reverse! Get us to hell out of here now!”
Too late. Sabot blocks hurtle down a frictionless magnetic-coil tube hanging from a jury-rigged rail system reeved below Warsaw. Big, ice hyperbullets emerge already traveling at maximum velocity. Raule has no chance to deflect, intercept or evade the incoming projectiles.
A sabot ice-round is a 100-kilogram mass traveling at high speed. It’s not micro dust or tiny ceramic pellets easily deflected by a heavy dodger. The first sabot actually smashes Raule’s dodger, cracking it wide open like a coconut hit with a heavy machete. The next two hardened blocks break the Bridge apart with enormous impact energy, killing the daisa and first officer with shock waves and chunks of free debris and shattered deck shrapnel. The next four rounds fly into the gaping hole already ripped into the Bridge, smashing into the Afterdeck and Bilge right behind. More rounds follow, making more raw holes as Raule buckles, shudders, and flips over. Secondary, internal explosions rip an aft section right off the ship. It snaps in two.
Magda half-recalls an old verse, with a twist. ‘Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. I know enough of war and hate to say that for destruction ice is also great, and will suffice.’
“Well played, Captain Dan. Well played indeed. Now, head all-out for the bohr-zone.”
Asimov stays with the troopships as Resolve and Tyco Brae vindictively pour energy and plasma weapons into the gaping, crumbling ruin that was Raule. Some laser gunners are in hot blood at what they know its daisa was trying to do. They take it out on hi
s crew, picking-off and cutting-apart yawls and even the smallest pods trying to escape the wreck, even slicing into three tiny figures flailing in open space after falling out wearing emergency vacuum suits.
Émile thinks the same thing that he did while watching nine Kölns die off Genève’s moons, when war first came into his life and he gave Magda a battle plan that killed 2,000 crew.
‘What a foolish waste. Why did they come here? War forces tragedy on some, black comedy on others, bloody murder on us all. No one can stay clean involved in filth like this.’
A harder thought comes racing in, tripping on the heels of the first. ‘Not all deaths in war are tragic. Some lives are much improved by death.’ He means the cruel daisa, who must have believed Jutlandia was a naked and unarmed civilian liner and was going to gut it anyway.
The Weapons Officer is not at all poetic. He just thinks it’s odd that a modern warship is destroyed by ice, as if still blind-sailing an arctic sea and hitting a floating mountain in the dark.
